Many information retrieval tasks are entity-centric, and focus on particular types of entities with well-known and strongly typed attributes. For example an entity such as a company may have a number of employees, a stock symbol, a business address, a quarterly earnings date, and numerous other known attributes involving dates, dollar amounts, geographic locations, and so forth. Similarly, a person may be characterized by a birthday, a home address, a social graph, and so forth. Searching for new information about an entity from among unstructured or semistructured data requires attention to both the description of the entity and the content of documents that are retrieved in response to this description. While tools such as foldering trees have been developed to help gather and sort this type of information, there remains a need for improved tools for a user to discover and gather data into a profile for an entity.